Manufacture of parts through machine cutting, milling, grinding and/or EDM processing is widely employed in industry. Aside from the very expensive and fairly rare proposition of milling a part in a tombstone pallet, often a part is milled, drilled and ground outside the confines of a pallet. A pallet, however, is typically employed to hold the part for EDM processing. Commercially available pallets for EDM processing typically have receiver units that mount to the top surface of mounting rails on a work piece within the wire EDM machine. A drawback is that EDM, for example, which is an efficient process otherwise, is limited to smaller plate work without removal and subsequent re-installation of the work piece as well as re-calibration of the receiver unit, and the work piece set up for EDM requires a very high degree of precision. This increases the possibility of error as well as the time required in manufacturing the part.
A typical manufacturing process for making steel details for progressive stamping dies, in which usually no two details are alike, may generally entail manually setting up a work piece in a computer numerical control (CNC) machining center; performing the machining operation such as milling, drilling, boring, counterboring, and so forth; sending the work piece to a heat treating facility off premises for heat treating; performing multiple separate set up operations for readying the work piece for grinding, each set up for one side of the work piece, which is highly time consuming; subjecting the work piece to grinding, one side per time; set up for EDM, which is generally the most time consuming of steps; and subjecting the work piece in a pallet to EDM processing. Manual movement of the work piece is usually carried out between grinding and EDM processing. Known robots that do this type of work offer some level of automation, which improves upon the manual operations otherwise needed. However that may be, known overall systems are typically floor mounted, which prevents workers from access to much if not most of the machine tool space, which sits on the floor, while running; thus, in other words, the workers get “caged in” in the entry area to any robotics system. In addition, these robotic systems often prevent access to most of the machine tools while in operation. Also, the floor-mounted nature of the known systems limits the number of machine tools that can be tied together, and are not easily expandable, if at all. The robots that service the known systems generally have a high number of axes of motion, and yet the end result of their motions are often limited, especially since they service only one or two machine centers, which is not cost effective.
It would be desirable to ameliorate problem(s) in the art, and desirable to improve manufacturing efficiency. And, it would be desirable to provide an alternative to the art.